A vanishing theorem for tautological classes of aspherical manifolds (Q2024586)

Given a smooth oriented fibre bundle \(p: E \ \rightarrow \ B\) where the fibre is a compact closed manifold of dimension \(d\) and a characteristic class \(c\) in \(H^{k}(BSO(d); R)\), the tautological class is the class in \(H^{k-d}(B;R)\) obtained by evaluating \(c\) on the vertical tangent bundle of the map \(p\). The main result of this paper shows that rationally these tautological classes depend only on the underlying topological block bundle under the further conditions that the Burghelea conjecture and the block Borel conjecture are true. This allows the authors to show that these tautological classes vanish for many bundles with fibre an aspherical manifold. The block Borel conjecture asserts the existence of a weak homotopy equivalence between the semisimplical set of block homeomorphisms of a manifold \(M\) and the space of homotopy self equivalences of \(M\). The Burghelea conjecture for a closed aspherical manifold \(M\) asserts the finiteness of the rational cohomological dimension of the quotient of the fundamental group of \(M\) by an element of the center. The bulk of the paper consists of defining the tautological classes for block bundles to be able to use the conjectures.